Saturday, February 18, 2012

Favorite Children's Book: Mother Goose

You may know by now that nursery rhymes and I are good friends. There's something about them that just speaks to me of childhood and innocence and imagination. My aunt was a school teacher and she gave my oldest boy a copy of "Mother Goose" by Mary Engelbreit when he was just a little tyke. I immediately fell in love with this book. It's the best illustrated book of nursery rhymes that I've ever read (and I've read a lot!). My son was just as captivated by it as I was. I can think of many, many times when we sat together reading this book and couldn't put it down. He has always loved (and still does) reading and I attribute a big part of that to children's books like this that are amazing!

The thing I love about the illustrations so much is the color. She mixes and matches colors that you would never think match, but they do. The houses are fanciful and detailed. The home decorating is lovely and all of it just draws you right in to the book.

Reading nursery rhymes is so good for children to help learn language. They hear rhythms and rhyming schemes, learn new words, and discover what words mean through help of the illustrations. You can help them memorize the rhymes by reciting them to the children while you're giving them a bath:

Rub a dub, dub

Three men in a tub...

When you go to the store:

To market to market,

to buy a fat pig:

Home again, home again,

jiggety jig.

Or even when they fall down:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses

And all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as our family has. It's a treasure!